if i should die this very moment — from dream to dream
by allatraka
Summary: Barry Allen escapes the city, but he can't escape himself.
1. Chapter 1

"The truth is I'm stuck here in Central City. Fear has kept me in that living room for 14 years."

* * *

There was a moment that came in the minutes afterwards, when he was in a stranger's bed, after the bliss and after the release, while his limbs were still weak and the sweat starting to cool on his body, a moment when his mind was clear—he could see the measure of his life before him and accept it with an indifference that was almost calming.

It wasn't about the sex, not about the act of it. It wasn't about the distraction. It was about how a person, someone whose name he would forget even as they were kissing him, would reach out and touch him so he would feel good. Just that one act, how it was committed without thought, without calculation, a spontaneous gesture of consideration. It was about how a person would let a near stranger see them in such a vulnerable state, naked and wanting, how someone would let him see that and ask him to do something for it. He liked the kissing and the touching and the fucking, but what he liked best was someone needing him for those few minutes; he liked being able to give someone pleasure, liked being able to make someone come, liked the offer of it in return.

All he ever had was perhaps a shared drink and a few exchanged glances, but with just that he found he could make something with a stranger. He could find a person he didn't know, and they'd be generous with him; they would reveal a multitude of desires and emotions to him, and they wouldn't fear that it could have a consequence. He saw how easy these feelings came, when the only person to witness them was someone you knew you'd never see again. Expectation and selfishness; regret, ecstasy; surprise and pain–all these things he could find in another person, flitting across their face or present in how tightly they held on to him, in how their gaze would drift away from him to a place right above his shoulder. He'd get these things from a stranger over the course of a couple hours, without ever having to know what they wanted or why, or if they cared for him and how, and he, in turn, would only have to offer them the slightest semblance of what you expect a person to be: "What's your name?" Ben or Lars or Jerry; "What do you do?" "I teach high school chemistry," or "I work in law."

Anything, anyone. If he wanted to be funny he would say "Plastics," if he wanted to be flirtatious he would say "Anything you want me to." Sometimes he'd just shrug and kiss them in answer. He never had to say where he was from or who would worry about him if a sudden storm came to the city. He never once felt the urge to say, "My mother, when I was eleven…" All he had to do was reflect the anonymity he saw before him, live up to whatever lie he'd given of the person he was supposed to be that night. And when it was over he could take everything he'd seen and felt, the embarrassment or the longing, the recognition or the fear, fold it up and leave it behind, like a suitcase someone else had left near him, and so wasn't his responsibility.

He had to choose the right person. Sometimes he messed up. There'd been times when he'd chosen the wrong person, especially back when he'd first moved to New York. He'd chosen a Jim once, who'd been shorter than him but thicker, and who'd left him with bruises he hadn't wanted, that were hard to hide and had him wincing at unexpected times. The whole rest of that month people had asked him, "Are you all right?" and he'd have to smile and answer yes. He'd stood in front of his bathroom mirror, frowning at his himself, avoiding looking at the marbled skin of his shoulder, trying to arrange his face into some sort of composure that would indicate he was decent, he was good, he was living his life as he should and didn't need anyone to ask after him. He'd once chosen a girl in a red halter top who'd offered him something he shouldn't have taken, and who in turn had taken everything in his wallet except for his MetroCard. He tried especially not to look for girls with dark hair and dark eyes but bright smiles, because that was dangerous, that was wrong in a way that would be unforgivable, and that would give him license to inflict a pain he didn't want to. The whole point of this, anyway, was to forget, not to fuck someone else but think of her.

That morning he thought of her anyway. It was because of the way Jonathan, or maybe it was Jon for short, he wasn't sure, had been kissing him the night before, with his hands on the back of his head, making it harder for him to move the way he'd wanted. Jon or Jonathan was lying next to him right then, curled up on his side, his chin tucked to his chest, head on his arm. The night before Jon had brushed his eyebrows straight before kissing him on each one, a tiny gesture that had touched him, unexpectedly. He'd spied him sitting alone at a bar, nursing a fourth or sixth Old Fashioned, and all he'd had to do was smile and order the same drink for Jon to take him home. He hadn't looked around the apartment when they got there. He'd kept his hands in his pockets and watched as Jon took a record out and placed it on the turntable. A woman with a soft voice. Marta Gomez, it sounded like. Jon had wanted to dance, but he hadn't been in the mood for sentimentality, so instead of taking his hand he'd started to undress. When Jon had come he'd tried to hide, screwed his eyes shut and turned his head to the side, as if that would be enough to keep him from seeing his face. Jon was kind. They just hadn't shared anything that would allow him to know how he liked being held.

He knew how to kiss Iris. She'd taught him how, back during the summer after they'd graduated high school, back during those few blissful months when they were something neither of them wanted to name because they hadn't wanted to let go of the comfort and the history that came with "best friends." They hadn't wanted to let those words go for something else, something that could have slipped away from them much more easily than best friends ever could. They'd spent those afternoons when neither of them were at their summer jobs sitting on her bed, legs all over each other and fingers intertwined. She'd laughed when he'd once said her hands were cute, when he'd then taken one and kissed the pad of each finger. She'd whispered into his ear what she liked; she'd been shy so she'd covered his eyes with her hand, her voice quiet, conspiratorial, like she was telling him secrets; her lips had been warm against his skin. He'd tried to do what she described. He'd pulled back to ask her, "Like that?" When she was satisfied she answered him with a nod and a smile, and when not she would pull him back to her to demonstrate—either left him elated.

She'd asked him what he liked, too. He'd given her a silly answer, he'd peered up at her while playing with the little curl of hair at her temple and said, "I like anything, so long as it's you. I like you," and he'd been telling the truth. So she'd asked him instead, to show her what he liked to do when he was alone. He'd been too embarrassed and flustered at first, but they'd kissed some more, lazily, experimentally, with fingers skirting under shirts and over ribs. She'd pulled away to look him in the eye when she lay her hand flat against his chest, right where his heart was thudding, and she'd told him how much she liked him, how happy she was when she was with him. She'd said please, so he'd lain back on her covers and thrown an arm over his eyes and shown her. Later, much later, after dinner and the dishes and Joe telling them that he had to finish some paperwork but that he'd be back before morning, she'd come into his room and pulled his shirt off, trailed her fingers down his chest and into his sweatpants to mimic the earlier movements of his own hand, and when she asked "Like this? Does this feel good?" he'd kissed her in response, exactly the way she liked.

He couldn't make out the time on his watch, but Jon's clock glowed a 4:12 in the dark of the apartment. He sat up carefully, slipped from the bed without making a sound, and felt along the floor for his clothes. He had his shirt on by the time he reached the door, and he waited till after he closed it behind him to put on his shoes. Outside, the doorman nodded a greeting and extended a hand to offer to hail him a taxi, which he declined. He walked a few blocks, looking up at the signs on each corner to figure out which part of the Upper East Side he was in.

The early morning air was already muggy with the promise of the city sun hitting city streets, as if the night hadn't done its job of cooling off the previous day's sweat, and as he walked he thought of how today seemed like yesterday, and how tomorrow would seem like a yesterday, too, and he thought of how long he'd felt like he'd been living a day that had no respite of night, no matter how dark it got. Bags of trash cozied up to mailboxes and streetlights flashed yellow and red, but this early in the morning there were barely any cars in the streets, just near empty buses lit up on the inside and taxis slowing down as they passed him to see if he would stop them, then speeding off again when he didn't so they could beat the next light. He liked taking the bus this early. He would sit next to the hotel maids who had to get to work in time to prepare to change sheets and vacuum carpets. Sometimes he would smudge a drawing into the condensation that collected on his window, then wipe it away so he could see the neon signs of the 24 hour delis and laundromats passing by. But that morning he was tired and cold, he had to be at work in a few hours and he didn't want to waste any time transferring. He checked his phone and found his way to an opening for the 4. In the train he closed his eyes against the fluorescent lights and listened to the discordance of the clacking and rumbling of the cars over the tracks. He searched through the noise, strung a rhythm together out of it.

It was a game he and Iris had played as kids, taking bits and pieces of whatever the world offered them at any moment and making something out of it. Once, when visiting his dad, he'd told him that he and Iris had learned how to count by running up and down the stairs at their house and screaming out the numbers as they went. He had no memory of this, but he did remember that there were exactly 18 steps from their old foyer to the second floor. Before he lived with her, back when he still had someone to call his mother, back when she did too, their parents would have dinner parties where they were the only children, and he and Iris would sit at their own little table. She would take his knife and her fork and enact a scenario between the two, and he would use his spoon to join in. They perfected this trait, this thing they did where they made the world comfortable for themselves, when they were teenagers, when the easiest way they had of showing their affection for one another was through teasing. When they were studying for a test together he'd ball up loose pieces of paper to throw at her; during lunch at school she'd make grotesque caricatures of his favorite anime characters in her mashed potatoes and laugh at him when he got indignant. At home she opened the bathroom door on him when he was checking to see if he was finally growing facial hair, and he placed her favorite cereal on the highest shelf in the cupboards. It didn't much matter where they were or who they were with; it always seemed as though the world were there just to allow them endless ways to speak with one another.

The last time he'd spoken to Iris hadn't been the last time he'd heard her voice. The last time he'd heard her voice he hadn't said a word to her. He still knew her phone number, still knew Joe's, too, still knew the number that would appear on his phone whenever a scheduled call came from his dad; but the last time he'd heard Iris's voice he'd been fuzzy minded from too much alcohol and scared because he'd woken up not knowing where he was or how he'd gotten there. He'd been huddled up in some corner next to a dumpster. The concrete beneath him had been cold and wet so he'd pushed himself up into a crouching position, leaned against the brick of the wall behind him because his head was so heavy and even this close to the ground he'd felt like he was going to fall. He'd dialed her number. It was the easiest thing, the surest thing for him to do right then, even though his fingers had been shaking. She'd picked up after a few rings like she always did. He'd remembered—no, he'd known, still knew—how Iris wasn't one to let a phone call go. She always picked up.

Her voice had been strained from sleep, and when she'd said hello it had sounded like a question. He hadn't responded, just closed his eyes to the sound of her voice and leaned his head back against the wall. She'd said hello again twice, asked who it was before she'd said his name.

"Barry?"

"Barry, is that you?"

"Are you ok?"

Her breathing had still had the cadence it took on during sleep, deep and long. He'd focused on it, sharpened everything down to a pencil point on lined paper, matched his breaths to hers so that he breathed in when she did, breathed out when she did. He had known the moment when she caught on to what he was doing—her breathing became more uniform, each breath in taking the same amount of time as each breath out. And like that a bit of the world had come back to him. His headache had come back to him, too, and he'd started to notice the strain on his knees from crouching for so long, but the feeling at the base of his throat, of an unsteadiness that made him gulp instead of breathe, had gone. He'd been able to place where he was and why: behind the bar he'd been at the night before; he was there because they'd kicked him out; he'd felt so tired he'd thought it would be a good idea to just rest a little while before heading home, and the ground had seemed like a good place for it.

That morning minutes had passed with just breath and the screen of his phone growing slick against his ear. He'd imagined her in bed, warm and safe, and that had made him feel good. He'd waited for her to tell him not to call her any more, but she hadn't. She never did. When she'd finally spoken she hadn't said "I miss you." It'd been a while since she'd said it. She hadn't asked him where he was, either. Instead she'd said, "I have to go, Barry, I'm sorry. Please—please, be good to yourself, ok? Bye."

She'd apologized to him, and he'd hated it.

That had been some months ago, almost a year. He wasn't as bad, now. He didn't drink as much, he had a job, and he wasn't new to the city anymore. He chose Jons instead of Jims, chose women whose interest in him didn't seem too quick or eager. He went jogging. When he was especially lonely he knew to find solace at a favorite museum or comic shop, and when he felt he couldn't stand to be around any other people he knew how to content himself in his apartment. He'd gotten plants to water and keep alive, peace lilies and snake plants and other dark greens that liked the shade. He'd started leaving food out on his part of the fire escape, a strategy he'd come up with to woo a stray cat that frequented the alley below so he could make friends with it. And he kept lists taped up to his fridge that detailed step for step what he needed to do to accomplish basic tasks—buying groceries, paying his bills, tidying up the apartment, preparing for the beginning of the work week on Sunday nights. He used these lists whenever his mind was particularly blank, and he trained himself so that if he found he'd been standing in one place for too long staring at and thinking of nothing, to walk over to them and choose one to fulfill.

When he got off the train he counted the steps up to the street, then counted the steps to his fifth-story walk-up. In his apartment he poured himself a glass of water while staring at the lists on his fridge, considered making one for the easiest meals to make for when he hadn't eaten in a while. He put a bowl of water out for Freddie—Freddie cause the cat had claws it liked to use to scratch against his window—and then he got into bed, fully clothed, hoping to sleep for an hour or so before he had to wake again for work, and if not sleep, then to at least close his eyes to himself and listen to the rest of the city as it woke.


	2. Chapter 2

"There was no lightning storm in your house that night. It was your brain helping a scared little boy accept what he saw...For once in your life, see things as they are."

* * *

The day Barry left Central City he was in Chicago. He was on his way back home from college for an extra long weekend, back to Iris and Joe. He'd wanted to pay for the trip on his own—had argued with Joe over it, had avoided the conversation entirely with Iris—and so instead of taking a plane, like Joe wanted, he was on a 2-day bus ride through the West and Midwest. After he'd told Joe that if he wouldn't let him pay then he wouldn't come at all, there'd been a long silence, and then Joe had sighed and said that he and Iris would be waiting for him at the station. "Be safe, I'll see you soon," he'd said. Since he'd been away at college Barry had ended most all his calls to Joe with "I miss you, too," or, "I can't wait to see you." But that night he'd said "Ok. Bye," and hung up.

The morning of his departure he got a text from Iris: I cannot believe you're taking a bus from California! :/ Do you realize how much time you're cutting out of your visit? He didn't answer. A few minutes passed, and then I just miss you so much. You're coming late and leaving early, and I wanted to spend that time with you. An hour passed, and then Iris began texting him awful puns, her effort to keep him from getting bored during his ride. He read every one of them, but he didn't answer.

On the second day of his trip, when the bus stopped at a Big Belly in downtown Chicago, he got off with all the other passengers. He asked the bus driver to open the baggage compartment for him, gave him an apologetic look because he was the only one who was taking out his luggage.

"We're not in Central yet, you know," the driver said with annoyance. "Still got a few hours."

"I know," Barry said, "I just—I just want my stuff."

"It's perfectly safe under the bus. The door's hard to open, and anyway, you can see the bus from the window."

"I know," Barry said again, "but I just want it with me."

"Are you getting off right now? Cause you'll just have to put it back when we leave, and we're only staying here an hour."

Instead of answering Barry went to the side of the bus and opened the underside compartment himself. He took out his suitcase and duffel bag and made his way into the Big Belly, calling "Thanks" over his shoulder to the driver as he passed him.

He wasn't planning on getting off right then. He just wanted a double cheese and a Dr. Pepper, and after paying he shoved his luggage in a booth and slid in after it. The rest of the passengers filled up the seats around him. Some were travelling alone, like him, and some were in pairs, but there was one family. It was two mothers, one of them pregnant, and two kids, a boy and girl. He'd been sitting in the row behind them on the bus. They'd taken up a row by themselves. The mothers had each sat in a window seat and placed their children in the aisle ones so that they could play with each other more easily, reaching over to exchange their shared tablet or a book. The night before he'd heard the mom on his side of the aisle sing her son to sleep, some old folk song about love and hardship that he'd thought was much too old for the boy, but it had worked. He'd fallen asleep with his head on his mom's lap and his feet dangling in the aisle, just a few inches away from his sister's. Throughout the night, whenever someone in front of them had to go to the restroom, they would lift their legs high to step over the children's feet and nod at the mothers, who would smile their apologies and thanks. Barry watched them now, how the kids fought over the toys that came with their meals, how the mothers exchanged small intimacies, touching each other's hands across the table, shushing their kids at the same time and brushing their hair from their eyes. He watched as the kids dutifully threw their garbage out, watched one mother help the other up from her seat. He watched them reboard the bus, the kids first and their moms after them, nudging them along.

From his window Barry watched as the bus left its parking space, and he thought of the last time he'd run away from home. He'd been angry with Joe for years after he'd taken him in, had been angry with him even as he'd needed him, even as he'd loved him. Years of anger, but it had only taken him a few months to go from calling him "Mr. West" to "Joe." He'd been fifteen and no longer angry at him, just upset that for Father's Day he'd had to spend only the hour allowed for visitation with his dad while Joe and Iris sat waiting for him outside in the car. Iris had given Joe her present and card for him that morning, and Barry had stood in the room behind her, hands in pockets and eyes on the floor. Joe had pulled both him and Iris in for a hug, even though he hadn't gotten him anything. It's ok, he'd told himself, because Iris had an extra surprise planned for her dad, and she'd invited him to help with it. They were going to cook him dinner—fish tacos, his favorite. But when they'd gotten home from the prison Barry had gone into his room and closed the door behind him, then climbed out his window and dangled from the rain gutter onto the lawn. It'd been four hours before Iris came and found him in the parking lot of the 7/11 near their school. Too late for them to make dinner. She'd been furious with him, so mad that she'd made him walk behind her the whole way as she rode her bike back home. What was almost worse was the look on Joe's face when they came back. His mouth had been set in a grim line, but it hadn't been one of anger. It'd been of hurt. That was the first time Barry had realized that he could do that to Joe, that he could make him look the way he did whenever Iris said some longing thing about her mother. Had he looked at him like that when he'd run away before? And if so, why had he only noticed it then? There'd been a plate of food on the kitchen table for him; not fish tacos, but the meatloaf from the night before. He'd eaten it while looking at Joe's back as he washed the dishes, shoving one forkful into his mouth after another even though he hadn't been hungry, and he'd promised himself he would never run away again.

Walking through Chicago streets was hard with the suitcase he had to drag behind him, especially because the map on his phone was so small, and he had no destination in mind. Every few blocks he stopped to look into windows as if he were interested in what was inside, but he was only looking at his reflection. His eyes, the planes of his cheeks, his hair, they had something of his father in them. But the rest he thought maybe belonged to his mother. He looked closely in each of the windows, tried to find traces of his mother in the reflection there. To keep warm he kept stopping to buy decaf in small delis. It wasn't even November yet, but as the sun went down the chill cut through the sweater he was wearing more easily and made him shiver. He'd left his winter coat back in his dorm because it took up so much space. He had another one, at home, at Iris and Joe's, but he wouldn't be able to get it now.

His mother had gone to Europe in the fall. She'd taken advantage of the travel abroad program at the university she attended. She'd gone to Spain, started out in Madrid, then made her way to Seville and Granada. The only person who could tell him much about her was his dad. Joe had gotten uncomfortable the one time he'd asked him what he remembered of her. But each time he visited his dad he would tell him a story about his mom. In the first years of his imprisonment they would trade the stories. They'd say "Remember when…" to one another, and smile and cry over what they could share. But then it became his father telling him about her, and him listening. He told him about how they met, back when her name was Nora Thompson, before she was his mother. He told him about how, after Granada and the Alhambra, she'd ditched her classmates and made her way up the coast to France, then Germany and the UK. She'd spent a year away from home, but she hadn't been running away from anything, as far as Barry could make out from what he heard. In the pictures he had of her from then her hair was cut short and she wore dangling earrings.

His dad always seemed to think it was important for him to remember his mother, a concern Barry didn't develop until he was well into high school because it seemed so preposterous to him that he could do anything but remember her. How could he forget the way her lips felt on his forehead when she kissed him goodnight, or how when she was cooking she would put a clip on her bangs to keep them from sticking to her forehead? How could he forget the last sound he heard from her, the scream, her hair flying about her face as her arm reached out from whatever whirlwind enveloped her? The time did come, though, when he realized that one day he would have spent more of his life without her than with her, and a feeling began to creep in on him that maybe the image he had of his mother in his mind resembled the photographs Joe had made sure to place in his room when he'd first come to live with him and Iris, and less like a person he knew from his own life. The time came when what he remembered most vividly about his mother, what stayed with him at nights when he tried to recall her, was her murder.

The summer before college, on a night when she snuck into his room to find him covered in a cold sweat, he'd asked Iris what she remembered of his mother, if anything. She'd told him something that had made him frown, because he didn't remember that about her at all. He'd asked why she thought she'd dropped out of school for a year, spent so much time far away from home and family. Iris had looked at him the way she did when she wanted to tell him something without hurting him, with her eyes wide and her head lowered. She'd told him that sometimes people needed to get away, so they could know who they were outside of everyone who knew them. That had been the first time he'd thought of his mom as someone who could have had another story, one that didn't end the way hers had. Iris did that, sometimes, widened things, made them bigger and made him see other possibilities. He didn't know if he liked it. After that night he started to try calling his mom as his dad sometimes did, "Nora," instead of how he always thought of her, as the person who used to tuck him into bed at night. He repeated things to himself that his dad had told him about her. She liked blueberries. She knew how to drive stick. She'd loved him more than anything in the world, but she'd also loved old Italian movies and walking barefoot in the grass. He tried to fit descriptions to photographs to reanimate the person who was slipping away from him, day by day. He wondered how she must have felt, travelling through Europe by herself. Had she felt like a foreigner? She'd gone before there were cellphones to help her translate whatever she needed to say. Had she called her parents regularly? And who was she, away from her family? Who could she have been before she'd met Henry Allen, before she'd met a man who would one day be accused of killing her? His dad could tell him what she'd done and where she'd gone, but he couldn't tell him anything else.

Iris had lost her mother long before he ever had. When people used that word with him, "lost," he always looked away, because it fit the truth of what had happened so awkwardly. There were other words to use: "taken," if you were being generous, "killed," if you were being honest. But lost was the word he always thought of when it came to Iris's mother. The only pictures of her in the house were in Iris's room, and he'd never had the courage to ask either her or Joe why, though he could guess the reason, from the way Joe would rub his wedding ring in a circle around his finger after any argument he had with Iris. He barely remembered Iris's mother, but he remembered how all of Iris's silences were laced with her. The loss she left behind her was amorphous and indistinct, so that it came up on you at the most unexpected moments.

There was an album Joe kept in the living room. It had all the school pictures Iris had ever taken. In her second grade class picture Iris had ribbons and barrettes all over her hair. In her third grade class picture, and in all the ones after until her sophomore year in high school, she had her hair pulled back into a bushy, bouncy ponytail. On his own mother's birthday Joe and Iris would drive him out to the cemetery where she was buried. He could tell Iris every single route they could take to get to his mother's grave, but Iris couldn't do the same for her mother.

Before he'd gone to live with her, Iris was the one who had always come over to his house. She would get in the back seat of his mother's minivan with him, and his mom would hand them both a snack before driving home, where Iris would stay until her dad came to get her. He'd always caught Iris staring at his mother back then, and he'd been too young to think anything of it, but he'd still take her hand and lead her over to his mother. Iris had been much quieter in those days. She'd hidden behind him sometimes, too shy to say anything to his mom, even though he always told her, "She's really nice, Iris, and she likes you. She told me so herself."

He'd hidden from Joe, too, in the first weeks after he'd come to live with him. He'd known he had something to do with why his father was in jail. He'd told him, again and again, that his father hadn't done it, that there'd been another man in his house that night, but that hadn't seemed to matter. It hadn't mattered to Joe, it hadn't mattered to the man who talked for his father in the courtroom, and it hadn't seemed to matter much to the doctor Joe had sent him to, either.

Before his own room just down the hall from Iris, he'd shared a room with three other boys in a building with a blank facade and metal doors at the front. He hadn't trusted Joe, because he knew he'd left him in that flat-faced building. "You left me there. You forgot about me," he'd told him once. He hadn't been able to look him in the eye when he said those words, there'd been a twisting in his gut because some part of him told him he had no right to the acid recrimination in his tone, that he had his own father, a real one, and so there was no reason to feel something so strong for Joe. But Joe had gotten down on one knee so that he was level with him and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. He'd said, "I didn't forget about you, Bare," and Barry had looked up at him then, sharply, because that was Iris's name for him, no one else had ever called him that before. Joe'd told him, "I would never forget you. Iris asks me for you every day." Joe had pulled him into a hug then, and he'd been grateful because he'd started to cry, and Joe had told him, "It was just paperwork, Bare. We just had to get through the paperwork before they would let me bring you home."

In those first weeks every gentle gesture from Joe had felt like some kind of betrayal on his own part, as if when he needed Joe to sit by his bed at night, or hold his hand while walking up to the door of his doctor's office, he was reaffirming what Joe said about his father. When Iris hugged him it was warm and quieting and he never wanted to let go. But when Joe hugged him, even when he wanted that hug, even when he needed it because Joe was bigger than Iris and he knew how to keep them both safe, he felt as though he was giving in to some weakness within him. And it was the weakness in him that was the truth, and that truth was that he didn't have a mother because his father had murdered her.

The truth, the real truth that he was hardly ever able to admit to anyone other than himself, was that the impossible always seemed more than just a little out of reach. It seemed like the rectangle he and Iris had made one night during a storm and power outage. They'd both been scared but hadn't wanted to show it. Then Iris had taken out a piece of chalk and crawled under the kitchen table. Joe had a sheet on it that came down around them, with edges that whispered across the floor. The table at his old home had been bare. With the chalk Iris had drawn lines between each of the legs of the table, and then she'd handed the chalk to him so he could do the same. "You make another line," she'd said, "Making a double line will make it stronger." She'd said, "If we stay on the inside then nothing can get us," and when her dad had come back up from the basement with candles and batteries for their flashlights, she'd grabbed at his pant leg and tugged him under the table with them. She'd made him draw a line, too. Barry had told him, "This way you can be safe, too." They'd spent the night under there, had fallen asleep together there. That was what the impossible was to him, those three lines that had kept them safe that night, a space where no one he loved could hurt or cause hurt.

In college it was harder to speak to his dad. He watched his roommate for weeks to recognize the patterns of his schedule, the better to be able to give his father a time at which he could call him. His father sounded different over the phone than when he was facing him. He sounded old, too old for his age, and with so much distance between them Barry could hear all the things his father didn't tell him. Tightly held memories of his mother and affirmations of his pride in him, but no stories of his own life. Barry could never ask him how his day had been. Over the phone his father's voice gained even more of that quality that made Barry wish he could do more than be a good son, made him wish that he could actually do something of consequence for him, something that could save his life. His father had a way of speaking with a ruefulness, as if he'd seen all the ironies life could come up with, and there was nothing left that could surprise him. He liked giving Barry advice, and Barry welcomed it, partly because he wanted to hear it from him, but also because he knew his father needed to do the things a father did, needed to be someone other than a convict. Sometimes his father would tell him something he'd already heard from Joe, and Barry would say, "Thanks, Dad." Iris had visited his father with him, sometimes. Once, after they'd left the prison and were waiting for the bus back into the city, she'd started to pet him like she sometimes did, fixing his collar, patting lint from his shoulder, and she'd told him his dad looked like he started missing him even before they'd left.

His dad loved Iris, said she had "gumption." He laughed more when she came with him for a visit, and always asked after her when he came alone. He rarely asked after Joe, and Barry never brought him up. He didn't think his dad hated Joe, he was just too kind a person for that, but he knew that they'd been friends before, and that they hadn't spoken since the last time Joe had interrogated him. In the days when he'd still been mad at Joe his father had told him, "I want you to listen to Joe, all right, son? Listen to him, he's the one taking care of you now, ok?" He didn't tell his father when Joe made detective, or how Joe taught him how to shave, or both him and Iris how to drive. He tried to find a way to share his life with his dad, to let him know that he was whole and happy, without making him feel like he was forgotten, like his wholeness existed outside of him, despite him.

Barry never once doubted that his father was innocent. He knew what he'd seen that night, even if he didn't yet have the words to explain it, to make it so others could understand, and he knew it was true, even if the only other person who believed him was Iris. But sometimes he thought about how scared his mother must have been when she was being killed, how alone she'd been, and he felt such an awe that in those moments, through her fear and through her pain, she'd been able to reach out to him and think of him. It made him quake, like he was standing in front of some giant gaping mouth that wanted to swallow him whole. And he sometimes wondered what value the truth had if it couldn't stand on its own, if it needed proof to have any material effect. What kind of flaw must be inherent in it, for it to need a buttress? He knew his dad was innocent, but his life was still orange jumpsuits and a sentence appropriate for an act he had never committed. He never doubted his father's innocence, but sometimes he doubted whether or not the truth mattered. In those moments he thought of how Iris believed him, of how she'd held his hand his first day back at school, of how she never once laughed at his story of the man in lightning, and he held on to the truth in her belief, because that had held him up, even when that other truth hadn't.


	3. Chapter 3

"Growing up together and knowing so much about each other...it made it hard for me to admit how I felt about you."

* * *

College was Barry's first taste of anonymity. When he met someone he could hold out his hand and say, "Hi, my name is Barry Allen. I'm from Central City," and not the slightest trace of recognition would pass over their face. There wouldn't be a frown as they tried to figure out where they'd heard that name before, wouldn't be the look of surprise when they remembered headlines and photographs of a barefoot boy in red pajamas and a man being pushed into a police car. There'd be a total blankness, and for Barry it was exhilarating. There, among the brick buildings and the wide lawns, he had no history that told people who could be friends that he should be avoided instead. He didn't need Joe to put a hand on his shoulder to steer him away from a prying look, or Iris to pop gum in his face and tell him he couldn't blow one as big as hers to distract him from a new cruel nickname. He never once had to say, "He didn't do it," because no one ever asked him what it was like to have a murderer for a father.

But with his anonymity came other questions. He had a roommate, Nate, who had two brothers and an older sister. His parents were divorced, and his dad had been the one to see him off to college. The first night they met he'd stuck his hand out and said, "Hi, you must be Barry, my roommate." Joe had been there, fingering the thin mattress and saying something about how small everything was, and when Nate had greeted him he'd said, "And you must be…" He'd looked between Barry and Joe expectantly, and then with confusion, until Joe said, "I'm Joe."

Barry hadn't anticipated it—this difficulty of situating himself in the world, of telling people who he was, giving a coherent picture of his life. In Central City, when people looked at him from the side of their eyes it was because his last name was Allen, not because they were trying to figure out what he was to Iris and Joe. Back home things seemed almost self evident, and though his place was marked with mocking and stares and avoidance, it could be named. He was the Allen kid, Joe's other kid, that kid Iris West was always with. Back home so much of who he was had been decided by the circumstances of his life, and without them he was fumbling. He wanted to be able to say "I'm Barry Allen," and have it understood what that meant, what "Iris" meant, what "Joe" meant, what they meant to him, but there would always be questions asking for specificity. Iris and Joe had always made it so easy for him to be a part of what they were, he'd never had the thought of defining it. He couldn't say something like, "They're people who love me." It didn't matter if that was the truth, it was too much and it was too vague.

He had a Chem lab partner who he invited over after they finished working on the first stage of their decarbonylation and complexation experiment together. His name was David. He was an only child from SoCal, and his father had been a doctor, like Barry's. His father hadn't had anything in his life to interrupt his practice, though, and Barry kept the similarity they shared to himself.

In Barry's dorm room, David spent twelve minutes staring at the pictures he had up of himself and Iris and Joe. He asked, "So, wait, she's your girlfriend, and that's her dad?" He picked up a picture of his and Iris's middle school graduation, he and Iris with huge smiles on their faces, Joe standing between them with a hand on each of their shoulders. "How long have you two known each other? I guess the whole high school sweethearts thing is easier to keep up when her dad likes you."

All Barry could say was, "Yeah." He wanted to say more, wanted to correct him and say that he and Iris hadn't been high school sweethearts, and that no, she wasn't his girlfriend, that they hadn't figured out what they were yet, but that would be too much. When David asked, "How come you have so many pictures of your girlfriend and her dad here?" Barry shrugged and asked him, "Wanna play Mass Effect?"

After David left Barry took down the pictures he had of Iris and Joe. He told himself he wasn't being a coward, that he was just tired, and that anyway he had their pictures on his phone and in his wallet. He tried to practice who he could be as he placed them back in his suitcase, what David could say if asked who he was. Barry Allen. Nate's roommate. Not sure about his dad. Think his mom died, though. He left only a photo from when he and Iris were in the third grade. His mom had still been alive then. Both his parents had volunteered to help chaperone their class's trip to the city zoo. In the picture his parents were posing side by side, smiles perfect on their faces, and he was in between them with a smile of his own. He'd wanted Iris to be in the picture with them, but she'd still been quiet then, and she'd shaken her head when he'd asked her to pose with them.

The next time David came over he saw the picture and asked, "This you, these your parents?" "Yeah," Barry answered, and David had no more questions.

Between classes and beer pong and figuring out professors' peculiarities, Barry learned how to temper how much he missed Iris so that it didn't overwhelm him. He'd had good practice of it, with his mother, with his father. When he spoke to her on the phone and eased into the familiarity of her laugh, he tried not to think of the irony there, that if his mother had had a different story, then he and Iris might have had one, too.

They'd been best friends since the first day they'd met. They'd seen other best friends come and go in their school years. Stephanie Lee and Caroline Johnson, Belle Daneuve and Ricardo Pineda. But he and Iris, they never drifted apart over the summer, and they didn't stop talking to each other when they started carving out different interests from one another. If anything, their differences made them closer friends. It gave them more to tease the other about. It meant they had more than one way of knowing each other.

Barry knew that sometimes, when Iris and her dad were having a fight, what he needed to do was stay quiet and step out of the room so they could work it out on their own. He was like a son to Joe, and Iris welcomed him into almost everything she shared with her dad, but there were landscapes between the two of them he couldn't map, that only they knew how to navigate. He knew the frustration Iris felt, whenever she pushed against something Joe had set around her, something that Joe refused to move. She kept words behind her teeth because she didn't want to bite her father too hard with them. He told her to say the words to him instead, so they wouldn't take up all the space in her. He knew, too, when to step between them, how to remind Joe who Iris was outside of him, that she had eyes of her own. Whenever Joe reacted to what Barry saw was his fear that his daughter was taking steps away from him, Barry reminded him of how tightly she held on to him when they hugged. He never told Iris what they meant to him, her and her father together, apart from him, but he thought she suspected it, in the way she listened to him through her anger when he told her Joe didn't have anyone else other than her. He knew Joe thought he saw too much of himself in her, in how stubborn she was, in how she tried to make herself big enough to protect everyone around her. She poured so much of herself into the people she cared for, and Joe thought it was something that could get her hurt. Barry saw it, too. She gave of herself without any meanness, and that was one thing, but she also expected the same in return, which was altogether different. Once she trusted you she wasn't afraid to want from you. It made her vulnerable in a way Joe didn't like, but Barry always thought if he couldn't get his father out of jail, if he couldn't turn back time and give his mother another story, then he could find a way to let Iris be as vulnerable as she wanted.

In their friendship Barry felt safe letting Iris see the parts of himself he never wanted to look too closely at himself, because he knew she wouldn't use them to hurt him with. But he also trusted her with them because she'd told him, though not with words, that sometimes she thought at the root of any relationship was some sort of transience. She'd said to him once, almost in passing, "There are all kinds of ways for people to leave you," and so he gave her something to hold on to. She was right, of course. Barry knew miles weren't the only way distance could manifest itself—time, the inevitable change that characterized any single person's life, death, all these were things that could make a person unrecognizable. And so he lay himself bare before her, and didn't startle when she touched him.

He could never pinpoint the moment he'd started loving Iris—he suspected he always had—but he recognized the panic that settled somewhere in his chest when he realized it, in their sophomore year of high school; it was something he'd felt before. It wasn't one single moment of revelation so much as it was a natural outcome of the self awareness that came with the later years of adolescence. Just as, after his growth spurt, he grew aware of the space his legs took up when he stretched them out, he started to recognize there was a certain weight to what he felt for Iris that didn't align with where he placed it. He made sure to keep his legs folded so as not to trip anyone who was walking by, and when he saw he wanted to take Iris's hand and lace his fingers with hers, he placed his hands in his pockets.

By senior year he understood that his knowledge of Iris—that she was the kindest, that she was the most fun, that she was the prettiest—was exactly that: his knowledge of her. He got into an argument with Samantha Harrison over it. Samantha Harrison laughed at him when he answered "Iris," to the question of who the smartest person in their class was. Samantha Harrison told him the name of the girl who was sure to be valedictorian, and Barry shook his head and explained it to her.

"No, that's not what smart means. I'm smart like that, you're smart like that, but what I'm talking about is how you think when you don't have certain parameters to guide you. Like, when you're not in class, or when you're not writing toward a thesis, or testing something against a hypothesis, or whatever. That's what Iris is. Like, she can take what she sees and tell you what it is, and then when you look, even when before you hadn't seen anything, you'll see it too, and you'll see it's true."

"Listen," Samantha said, "I don't know what you're talking about, but Iris West is not gonna be valedictorian, ok?"

Barry didn't respond, just folded up what he'd said, because Samantha was right. Not about valedictorian, but about his own response. It had been too much. He wondered how it was possible that he could be so conspicuous.

He told himself that nothing had to change, that he didn't have to lose her. All he had to do was act as he always had with her, but when he tried to think of what that was he realized that maybe he couldn't trust how he'd always acted. He'd always thought Iris was pretty, and had always told her so. He'd always hugged her and listened to her when she was upset. He didn't know how else to be towards her. It made him worry if maybe all this time he'd loved her, he hadn't been her friend at all, if maybe all this time he'd loved her he'd been lying to her, somehow. He tried to think of his other friendships, but he didn't have many to compare. All he knew was that what he felt for Iris then was what he'd felt for her the day before, and the day before that, and all the days before. He wondered what she would say, if he told her. He thought she'd be angry. Not because of what he felt, but because it meant the reciprocity they shared would be broken. He'd be offering something she couldn't give in return.

He tried to find a way to be in love with Iris without taking too much from her. He tried to find a way to be in love with her without thinking what it would do to him to tell her and in return to be revisited by that old panic, the one he'd first felt the night of his mother's murder—the sudden drop in his stomach, the swift, sure knowledge of what it was to be left alone. Knowing he loved her opened up a fear in him, but he liked thinking she was beautiful, he didn't want to stop thinking that. He liked huddling together on the couch with her during movie nights, and letting her pick all the best bits out of his salads for herself, and letting her poke him into doing things he would never do without her prodding. He liked being in love with her. If he didn't hurt her with it, he thought, then maybe it would be all right. Maybe if he didn't hurt her with it, he could still be her best friend. The thing to do, he decided, was not to take all the ways she loved him and make them mean something other than what they were. She held him when he was upset, too. She stepped in between him and Joe when they started yelling, too. She knew him in ways no one else knew him, too. He'd always been in love with her, and that was fine, that was good, but he had to keep himself from wanting her so much that he imagined something that wasn't there.

It was delicate, how he managed it. In that last year of high school together, it seemed to Barry that all they said and all they did somehow recalled what was immediately before them: that they only had a few months left together before they would each head to separate colleges. They would be away from each other longer than they'd ever been. They'd come to be something in living together—so close they recognized the cadence of the other's breath, could tell when the other was faking sleep; and while having a word for what he felt for Iris made Barry want to turn away from the future, he knew that she was just as wary of their coming separation as he was. She still looped her arm in his when they walked home from the bus together and he was still the first person she came to when she had something she wanted to share; she still called him names with such a fondness in her tone that he understood them as endearments. But every time she shared a secret smile with him, he reminded himself of the promise he'd made, that he would be as best a friend to her as she was to him, and wouldn't think her touch was a caress, no matter how much he wanted to lean into it.

He tried to reassure her, one night, even though he shared the same fear she did. They were both on the couch, reading. He was re-reading his favorite Le Guin, the one Joe had gotten him, and Iris was on her phone, browsing blog sites that posted conspiracy theories. He had his feet up on the table in front of them, and she had her feet pressed up against his thigh, her head propped up on the arm of the couch. Every few minutes she would poke him with a toe and paraphrase a conspiracy and ask, "True or false?" Barry didn't mind. He'd never been one of those people who needed quiet to read, and the faces Iris made at him whenever he got an answer right, which was close to always, made him grin.

"During the Cold War the CIA recruited top journalists to spread propaganda in the media and gather intelligence."

"True."

"The US regularly intervenes in the domestic labor policies of neighboring countries to further its own economic interests."

"True."

"A certain group of men in our government and military secretly fund projects in which terminally ill patients are used for experiments with viruses that don't exist anywhere in known nature and can only be des—"

"—cribed as extraterrestrial," Barry chimed in with her just as she said it. "That's not a conspiracy, that's from The X-Files."

"Just checking."

"Season one, episode twenty-four, 'The Erlenmeyer Flask,' written by—"

"—Chris Carter!" they chorused.

Barry put his book down. "Iris, most of these aren't really even conspiracy theories. They're just, like, history. Or news."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean people believe them, or even know about them."

"Not believing them doesn't change the actuality of their having happened."

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, really."

"Ok then, true or false, you finished the Pop Tarts this morning and then you put the empty box back in the cupboard."

"False. Absolutely false."

"Liar."

"I was a boy scout, Iris, I don't lie."

"What are you even saying? Who lied to Dad about taking their laptop apart on purpose and then trying to make it look like it 'just broke,'" Iris waggled her fingers in the air and raised her voice so she sounded like Spongebob Squarepants, "when he couldn't put it back together properly?"

"Okay, first of all, I don't sound like that. And second, that was five years ago, and Joe knew right away and he grounded me for the rest of my life. I think I might still be grounded, actually. And anyway, what I meant was I don't lie to you."

The moment he said it he wanted to take the words back. They were too much. He was always slipping up and telling her things that could reveal what he was trying to keep from her. In the silence that followed Barry saw Iris search his face, noticed how her features settled into something solemn. He tried to think of something else he could say, something to make her smile, but before he could she said, "I'm going to miss you." She was looking him in the eye and there wasn't a trace of shyness in her voice.

He wanted to say the same to her, but instead he looked down at his hands and said, "It's not gonna be so bad."

Iris sat up, pulled her knees to her chest and perched her chin on them. "Have you gotten your course schedule finalized yet?"

"Almost. They're still figuring out what to do with all my credits, so I might enter as a sophomore instead of a freshman."

"Of course." Iris wrinkled her nose at him and he laughed. "But it doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, if you go for the double degree you'll still be spending five years there."

Barry knew what she was really asking. It wasn't a question about the classes he'd be taking, but one about if they would manage to keep what they had when so much was about to change, and for so long.

"I'll come visit. And we can Skype and talk every day. And you can come out to California. I'll learn how to surf, and then I'll teach you."

Iris chortled, leaned her head back with it and then slapped his shoulder lightly. "You can barely walk on your own feet without tripping over them, Barry, how are you going to teach me how to surf?" She shook her head at him, smiling, and said, "And anyway, California isn't one huge beach. You'll be way too inland for that."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah!"

Barry clambered up on the table in front of them and set his stockinged feet apart, spread his arms wide, and started swaying from side to side.

"Barry, be careful, you dork!" Iris cried. She had one hand thrown out as if she would catch him if he fell, but she was grinning up at him.

He carded a hand through his hair, pretended he had long locks to flip over his shoulder, and said "Nah dude, it's not about where the beach is, it's about where you are. Cause you carry the beach with you." He placed a hand over his chest. "You carry it where it matters, man. Like. In your heart."

Iris laughed as he jumped off the table and settled back onto the couch with her. She shifted so that she was facing him, her legs under her and her shoulder against the back of the couch. "I'm pretty sure that's offensive to someone."

"Really? Who?"

"I don't know, but just don't do that when you get there."

"What, you think the other surfers will kick me off their turf? Anthony Kiedis will come and beat me up."

Iris shook her head at him. Her smile became softer. Something was changing again. They were returning to the question they both had. Iris was no longer smiling at him just because he was being silly. She was looking at him in a way he tried to keep himself from thinking she saved only for him, as if there were something she wanted to say, and he was the only person she could tell it to because he was the only person who'd understand. She said, "I'm going to miss this."

It was dusk outside, that moment right after the sun had set but it wasn't quite yet nighttime, where everything was still waiting to be covered in blue-ink shadow. Soon the streetlights would turn on. If they didn't turn a lamp on in the room, the lights from passing cars would come streaming in through the window, illuminating them for some seconds and then leaving them again in the coming dark. This close, though, he could still see every detail of Iris's face. She had a little curl of hair sticking out, right near her ear, the one he knew she worried with a finger whenever she was thinking. She'd started straightening her hair. She went somewhere downtown for half an entire day every few weeks, came back looking like someone in a magazine. All she was wearing right then was the lipstick she'd bought when they'd gone grocery shopping earlier in the week. It was a burgundy wine color that made her lips darker than they usually were. The rest of her face was bare, the way it was when she woke up in the mornings. He could tell the difference, now. She was wearing the grey sweats she'd bought with the name of the college she'd be attending in the fall printed across her chest. She'd only applied to colleges close to Central City.

He knew he'd been looking at her for too long. He thought he should turn the television on, give them some light and give him some distraction, and he turned around, faced forward to reach for the remote, but she stopped him. She said his name. She said, "Don't do that." He wanted to ask her "What?" but she was moving again, closer to him. She placed her hands on his thigh and leaned forward so that she was on all fours, and then he could feel her breath on his face and the ends of her hair falling across her shoulders to graze against his shirt.

He would let her kiss him, if she wanted to. That wouldn't be breaking any promise he'd made. She gave him chaste kisses at first, just the quick pressure of her lips, nudging, as though she were being careful, asking. She offered them to him, her small kisses. With each she closed her eyes, then pulled away to consider him, her eyes darting between his. He kept still, and didn't look away. Her next kiss wasn't chaste. Her lips brushed up against something he kept coiled tight in him and he felt it easing.

He let her kiss him. He let himself cup her face, lean into her. He let his world shift to accommodate a new reality where he had the knowledge of the pleasure of her against him, of her wanting this from him. He let himself meet her, the way he always did, when she asked him to. When she pulled away, he reached after her. He didn't want to break away from her, and the thudding of his heart came in his ears and throat. She was moving so she could straddle him, so that she could put her arms around his shoulders, so he'd be surrounded by her. He tipped his head back for her, baring his neck, welcomed the pull of her fingers in his hair. He gripped her waist. For the slightest moment he wondered if for her this wasn't what it was for him. If for her this was just something she needed to make to hold against the months and miles they'd be separated from one another come the fall. He almost shrugged at himself. In truth he didn't care if that was what this was, if that was all she wanted him to give her. But he saw a glimpse of himself afterwards, of the lie he'd have to tell her that that was all he wanted, too, and he couldn't do it. When she settled her weight on his thighs he raised his hips up against her, sharp and rough, lifting her off the couch. She had to spread her knees to make the room for his waist and something about that made him want to kiss her hard. Now he knew just how well he fit against her, she was trembling and he wanted to hold her and help her still.

He pushed her away from him. He scrambled off the couch and he took the steps two at a time.

Upstairs he splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His face was flushed. His hands were shaking. She'd gotten her lipstick on him, it stood out stark against his skin. He wiped it away with tissue paper.

He hid there, locked the door behind him and kept his back against it to hear when she came up the steps, to hear if she would knock on it to call for him, but she didn't. Hours later he heard Joe's voice downstairs greeting her. He asked her why she was sitting alone in the dark. He asked her, "Where's Barry?" and Barry heard her respond, "I don't know."

In the days that followed, there was something more than awkwardness between them. There was a distance that spoke of some kind of rupture. Iris apologized to him. The next night she stood in the frame of his door with her arms crossed over her chest, only the tips of her toes crossing into his room. She held her chin up and her gaze steady when she said, "I'm sorry, Barry. I shouldn't have done that." She was always so precise with herself. But he didn't want her apology. He didn't like it when she was sorry because of him, but all he could do was shake his head mutely. Even though he didn't say a word, she nodded at him as if she understood, as if he'd said something to confirm that the touch of her lips was something to feel sorry for.

Barry didn't know how to move around Iris. It was as if he'd lost a fundamental understanding of his body, and when he was close to her all he could bring himself to do was look at the ground and be as still as he could. There was a twist in his gut that lurched each time he saw her, and he didn't know how to calm it. He wanted to say something, he wanted to tell her why he'd turned away from her, but he couldn't come up with an explanation that didn't have to do with his loving her. She knew something of that truth, now. She knew that he'd kissed her back, that he'd run his hands up her thighs and bit her bottom lip. She'd never seen that in him before. He'd never meant her to, and he didn't know how to cover it up again. He didn't know how to be who he'd always been to her, now that she knew what else he could be with her, what else he wanted.

In the mornings Barry woke up early so he could use the bathroom and be out the door before Iris, without having to see her. At school he used hallways that avoided her locker. He didn't spend his free period with her. He spent lunch in the library instead of at the seat she always made for him at the table with her friends. When they did come across each other, they exchanged greetings and nothing more. Barry couldn't remember the last time he'd said "hi" to Iris without a conversation following it, and in those days the silence after their greetings had more weight to them than the tight smiles they gave each other. Joe didn't say anything about the cautiousness between them, but he did comment on how irritable Barry was, and whenever Barry gave him a sharp answer he'd stare at him with raised brows until Barry mumbled an apology.

Iris didn't touch him. Their fingers didn't brush when they passed dishes to each other during dinner. There was a cheeriness to her voice when she spoke to him, and he recognized it as something close to the tone she used with strangers when they asked her for directions. It unmoored him, made him trip even, to hear Iris's voice and find only distance in it. What he'd been afraid of was becoming true, only it wasn't coming about because he'd told her the truth. Their friendship was slipping away because he'd lied. It didn't matter that she didn't know it was a lie. He wondered if it wouldn't have been better to have kissed her, to have let her see everything, and have her tell him she didn't want it, than to have this—this silence that was like noise, and told him his fear was right, that losing Iris was the same as that first wound, barefoot on wet asphalt, alone and cold and not knowing how he'd gotten so far away from home.

The night came when Iris looked at him the way she did when she wanted to tell him something without hurting him. Barry was dreaming about his mother. It was always the same dream.

One man, or was it two? His mother was at home, the home he used to share with her, and he was upstairs in his room, a fear of the dark assuaged, to be replaced with others soon. His mother's back was turned to what was to happen to her. He couldn't hear anything, not because there was no sound, but because the air was full of cotton, cotton that seemed to press down, down, and in, in, so no matter how much he held his breath he still took up too much space. He couldn't move through it, but they could. One man or two? Always circling each other, like all eternal things. In the kitchen above his mother's head there always appeared shards, thousands of them, and they fell around her, disappeared at her feet. He was always eleven and in his room and his age now in the kitchen with her. He was too distracted by the shards to speak to his mother, to Nora, to warn her. He tried to catch them, could never tell of what. He caught them to keep from disappearing, he knew he just had to put them together, make something coherent out of them, and whatever was coming would stay at bay. He gathered them in his arms and once he placed them there they were so heavy that he started stooping. He thought he could feel his shoulders coming out of their sockets, the curve of his spine was stretching, stretching and becoming wider than it was supposed to. The thousands of shards pinned him to the ground and when the lightning came he tried to let them fall so he could get his mother out of there, so she wouldn't be alone with only fear to remind her of her life, but they stuck to him and he stuck to the ground. He never heard her voice, but he saw her ashen face. He saw the knife the gash it made. It tore at her shirt and the flesh of her breast and sunk into her heart so that blood bubbled up to her lips and down her chin. She still screamed out his name and reached out for him even though there was blood in her throat, even though he couldn't hear her. He could make out the dark hole of her mouth, it was endless, her scream, useless too, and that's when he always woke.

That night Iris snuck into his room right after he opened his eyes. He didn't know how she always knew, he hadn't had that dream in so long, and he'd stopped waking up screaming years ago. She came to him even though he'd lied. He asked her what she remembered of his mother and when Iris looked at him like she didn't want to hurt him, he kissed her. His eyelashes were wet from how he'd been crying, and his t-shirt was sticking to his shoulder blades from the dream.

"Sometimes you have to be away from the people who know you best, so that you can know who you are when you aren't with them," she mumbled when he asked her why his mother would have spent so much time away from home. She said it cautiously, with the same delicacy she'd been using with him ever since he'd pulled away from her kiss on the couch. It was the most she'd said to him in weeks. She'd come into his room, climbed into his bed to tell him he was just having a dream, that she was there and she was real, and she still hadn't touched him. It made the ache in him worse, to see how carefully she asked him, "Was it the same dream again?" She held herself away from him, even then, even as she was comforting him. She started picking at a loose thread on her pajamas. Barry could remember wanting to kiss Iris ever since he'd started wanting to kiss at all, but right then, with a little bit of her hair peeking out from under her scarf and her gaze turned carefully away from him, he wanted to kiss her to reassure her. He wanted to apologize. For his fear. For his lies. He wanted to tell her that she could want anything from him, and she didn't have to feel like she couldn't ask it of him. He wanted to let her know that she didn't have to hide anything from him, that if she was angry or scared, or if she wanted to be selfish, that it was ok, that he could take it; that even though they'd be thousands of miles away from each other for the first time in their lives, it wouldn't do away with who they were to each other. He wanted to tell her he thought they were made of stronger stuff than silence and omission and fear, and when she shifted closer to him, moved her hands to his shoulders, opened up to him without any hesitation, he knew it was true.

They only shared the one kiss that night. After her lips he brushed his against her cheek and her neck and buried his head in the crook there. He held on to her, whispered his thanks to her. They spent minutes with her rubbing her hand up and down his back, and then she moved, guided them both to settle on his pillows. Iris said his name very softly. She asked him if this was all right. She told him she didn't want him to turn away from her. She asked, "Don't ask me to leave." He almost wanted to laugh because he was holding her as she spoke. He pulled her closer and said, "Please don't." And then, "I'm sorry about before."

"Don't be sorry," she said, her voice small, but he thought he should tell her more. He wanted to tell her then, while he still had the awe from his dream to remind him how big fear could be. "It's not that I didn't want to, or didn't want you. I—I do. It's just that I didn't know what would come afterwards. I still don't." He felt her move against him, lifting her thigh so she could place it over his hip.

"Maybe...maybe we don't have to think about that. Maybe we can just keep going like this, and see what happens." He felt his heart beating faster, wondered if she could feel it, too, with how close she held herself against him. He wanted to tell her what this was for him, to make it clear. He said her name and then he said, haltingly, because he'd never before said it to mean what he meant right then, "I love you, Iris." He didn't apologize afterwards.

Barry couldn't fall back asleep the whole rest of the night, but they stayed there in his bed together, he and Iris, curled tight around each other, and filled out all the silences they'd kept for the past weeks until their voices grew hoarse. Iris had to wake again only a few minutes after she'd fallen asleep, right when dawn was creeping in past his blinds, so she could pad back to her room. Before she left she held his face in her hands for some minutes but didn't say anything, and then she smiled, a real smile that made him want to kiss her again, and so he did, a chaste kiss this time, because he was smiling too widely in return for anything else.

He could kiss Iris. It made Barry giddy. It brought a shyness to their glances and touches and words they'd never had before. Barry learned that Iris liked to curl her fingers in the fabric of his shirt, and that she liked it when he kept a hand at the small of her back. That last summer together he was a counselor at a science day camp and the kids would run up to him and scream "Your girlfriend's here" whenever Iris stopped by for lunch, and he swore to her he hadn't told them to call her that. On his days off he would spend all his time at the pool where Iris was a lifeguard, until she banned him from being there because he kept distracting her ("What, with my body?" "Yes, Bartholomew, you keep distracting me with your amazing bod," but she still pushed him up against the lockers for ten minutes before leaving). They put into practice what she'd said the night of his dream. He didn't ask her "And then?" and he didn't think of what he'd do come the end of the summer, when he'd have to pack his books and clothes and kiss her a last time. Everything was deferred.

Iris had always been generous with her love. Just as Barry never questioned his father's innocence, he'd never questioned Iris's love for him. But that summer when she said she loved him she meant something different, and it made him feel like he could bear anything in the world. He'd known almost his whole life what it was like to be loved by Iris, but now he knew what it was to have her love him like this, with a longing that wasn't as simple as a craving for touch, but was, for him, to recognize something precious in her, and to care for it, and with her welcoming from him the longing for the same. Not much changed between them, even with the kisses, even with the way Iris liked to trail her fingers up his stomach and over his chest, except that now there was more they could give and ask of each other, without feeling like it was too much. He knew he liked to tease her till she was willing to bite him to get him to do what she wanted, and yet that didn't change what they knew of each other. They didn't have an exact name for what they were, but he thought best friends was still the closest fit. He asked her, one late August day, if she would still tell people that's what he was to her, and she flicked the few blades of grass she'd pulled from the ground at his face. They were at a park, she with her back up against a tree and he with his head in her lap. She said, "Of course," as though nothing could change the place he held in her world, but he still asked her, a little shyly because there weren't any ten year olds to scream it out, what she would call him if she wouldn't call him her boyfriend. Iris said, "I'll just say you're Barry. My Barry." He repeated it, liked the sound of it so much he was grinning, and then she said, "But you are, you know." She was looking at him like she wanted to make sure he understood what she was saying.

"Yours?"

"Still my best friend."

"You're still mine, too."

There was still comfort and ease between them, but there was also awe, in cupping her elbows in his palms, in whispering what he liked best about her in her ear to make her laugh, in tracing thoughtless patterns with his finger on her knee. He knew the width of her shoulders held between his hands and it was precious to him, as were the half moons at the bottom of her nails and the weight of her breasts in his palms and the excitement in her voice every time she told him of a new writer she'd discovered. He felt a sense of wonder in seeing the same reflected in her, that she took a joy in the most benign things about him—she liked his freckles and the scar on his forehead, she liked kissing his shoulders and the backs of his hands. She told him she liked how raw his voice got when he'd been explaining a theorem to her for too long but kept talking anyway. She kept saying how warm he was, as if he had some superhuman ability that kept him running hot that he was keeping a secret, and every time they hugged she would sneak her hands under his shirt to warm them against his back. He saw that he made her happy, just him, with things he never even thought of, that he didn't work on. She loved him. On nights when he was alone in his bed he thought of how Iris made the world wider, and he hoped maybe he did the same for her; he told himself one day he'd tell her all the ways she made him see how else his world could be.

Usually when Barry came home from visiting his father he felt a biting numbness in him, and to keep from lashing out with it, to keep from saying things he didn't really mean, he would stay quiet and to his room. But one night he came home to the sound of Joe and Iris in the kitchen. From the door he could already tell they were making one of their grand dinners, the ones that would last them into the rest of the week and which Iris would pack up in Tupperware and urge Joe to bring to his colleagues at the precinct. They had music on, Joe's favorite Cab Calloway album, and they were both scatting along, Joe well and Iris not so well. Barry made his way over to the kitchen, a smile already tugging at his lips in preparation for what he was about to see, and he stood in the doorway to watch them together, no thought of where he'd just been on his mind.

They were making lamb meatballs. Iris had her hands in a huge bowl, was mixing the onions and the garlic and the ground meat together and shaping them into little balls, and Joe was over by the stove, checking the rice. Watching them together, Barry saw the effortlessness with which they moved around each other. They switched between the table and the stove and the counter without bumping into each other. Joe opened cabinets above Iris's head, and he peaked his head into the fridge behind her as she held the door open. She knocked him in the ribs when he peered over her shoulder and told her her onions needed to be chopped more finely. She told him, "Just mind the rice, old man," and Joe placed a hand over his heart in mock pain. Barry remembered Iris telling him when they'd started cooking together. It had begun after her mother had left. She'd told him she thought maybe her dad didn't have all the words to say to her back then, and so he'd given her this instead, a ritual, something they could make together, something that could sustain them.

Barry knew soon Iris would spot him and would warn him away from the food, tell him the only thing he was allowed to do was make the salad. She'd wipe her hands on her apron and walk over to him, laughter and playfulness in every movement and gesture she made, take his hand and pull him into the kitchen behind her. Joe would tell him to hand over another beer from the fridge and ask him about his day. When she was done with the meatballs Iris would wash her hands and flick the water at him. Maybe she'd give him some small, surreptitious affection, maybe brush her fingers against the nape of his neck or hold a spoon up for him to taste what she was making. And he'd receive it with a blush, because though Joe knew almost better than they did what they were, all he ever offered them was a look from the side of his eyes with a shake of his head and a chuckle to himself.

Watching them, Barry remembered the day he'd accused Joe of having left him behind. There before him, he saw the answer Joe had given him so many years before. He'd said, "Iris kept asking me for you." There'd been a shade of something in that statement he'd been too young to be able to decipher, but right then he thought he understood it.

Right then, standing just outside the kitchen and watching them, knowing that at any moment Iris would call him over and fold him into their dinner-making, that they'd both find some warm place to tuck him into what they'd built together, Barry felt full of something he couldn't describe. It wasn't happiness, though he was, indescribably so. It was a feeling of certainty, of conviction. He realized that what he had before him was exactly what he wanted. He realized that on the bus from the prison his thoughts hadn't been with his father, but with what he was headed to. He'd been thinking of Iris and how they had plans to go to the Gregg Araki retrospective together later that week, of how, if the night was chilly, he'd take her hand in his and hold it in his pocket. He knew right then that he wanted what was before him more than anything else in the world. He had a great life, with Iris, with Joe. He'd known and loved this life longer than any other, and in that moment a clarity tore through him like a knife. He knew that if given the choice he'd choose this life over any other.


End file.
